What microwave oscillators have to do with ray guns and the fundamentals of creativity.

Archival footage can be an endless source of paleofuture edutainment. We’ve previously enjoyed vintage educational documentaries on everything from the art of bookbinding to the dawn of computer music. Today, we turn to a 1963 educational film from Bell Laboratories. Titled Principles of the Optical Maser, it introduces the “optical maser” — the device that came to be known as “laser,” or Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, the first functioning Bell prototype of which made its debut in 1960. (A laser, in most basic terms, is merely a maser that works with photons in the light spectrum.)

More than anything, delightfully dorky as the footage may be, it’s also an illuminating glimpse of incremental innovation at work — a reminder that even the most advanced technologies of our time built upon the work of those who came before, as Steven Johnson keenly argues in his excellent Where Good Ideas Come From

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